


to what your heart once was

by apocalyvse



Category: Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (Disney Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Long lost siblings, Not Canon Compliant, Prophecies, Sort Of, Soulmark AU, a light sprinkling of death, also moonstones work Differently, hardcore sibling feels, only two people die i promise, the moonstone was never stolen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24585583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocalyvse/pseuds/apocalyvse
Summary: They aren’t supposed to be twins, and their mother isn’t supposed to die. One is not supposed to wail and scream while the other lies small and pale and silent as the mountain. And neither is supposed to be born with hands painted in deep, pure black – one with an almost perfect copy of the pattern recorded in the prophecy, the other with a handful of fractured lines, gathered around his wrist.
Relationships: Willa Lykensen & Wyatt Lykensen
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	to what your heart once was

**Author's Note:**

> the playlist for this fic is:  
> [fear of the water](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T4THwne8IE) by SYML  
> [the bird by SYML](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vni9PvOWdTk)   
> [dark side by bishop briggs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akrnJEjUUm4)   
> [half light by BANNERS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SE1WaaNzW0)

In the meadow where the wildflowers grow, she learns to tie a hunter’s knot.

The man shows it to her, makes her sit in the sweet, still air of the dawn and watch for hours as his fingers glide over and around and under, again and again until she can make her fingers do the same.

“You have young, quick hands,” he jibes, when she throws the rope down, when she wants to storm away in frustration. “You could do this better than anyone I know. You just have to teach them how to do it.”

She knows he is wise, and she knows he is right, but she still stomps about and kicks angrily at the flowers for a while. There’s no joy in it, in the bitter anger and the tingly, needling feeling running through the marking on her hand that drives her to tread the fragile petals and vibrant colours into the dirt. There’s no joy in anything, not even a beautiful clearing deep in the forest or the sunlight soaking into her skin. There is only the grim satisfaction of being the queen of this domain, of deciding the fate of one small thing even if she can’t control her own.

The man waits patiently as she works her way through the flowers, greeting her only with calm and quiet eyes when she sits down and picks up her rope again, ripping apart the messy knot she’d left it in. He doesn’t comment, just smiles to himself and goes about tying and untying the knot in a steady rhythm in his lap, knowing that she will watch his fingers and figure it out herself.

She shouldn’t call him _the man_. It hurts him when she does. He wants her to call him _papa_ , or _dad_ or _father_ , or any other sweet, endearing name. He wouldn’t even mind if she called him _Rohan_ , like the rest of the pack does – _Rohan of the River_ , that’s what they say. She likes that name, privately. She thinks it’s fascinating, that he comes from another pack far away that she’s never heard of, that he never talks about, that one day she could go somewhere else and she could be _Willa of the Woods_. But she’ll never call him that. She’ll never tell him she likes it, or ask him what happened to his pack, how he ended up here. She won’t deign to stoop so far, to put away her walls for so short a moment in time.

He wants to call her other names too, she knows. He wants to call her _love_ or _pup_ or _darling_ , like he probably does the boy ( _Wyatt_ , her mind whispers, but she doesn’t say his name either; she just calls him _the boy_ , because that is all he is and ever will be, to her), but he refrains. He knows she doesn’t like to even be called _Willa_. He knows she doesn’t like to be called anything at all.

The knot comes to her fingers slowly, the rope twisting and curling around itself like the strange markings on her wrist. She stops to look at them for a moment as she picks at a messy knot, turning the rope this way and that to appreciate the way it matches the long, sweeping lines that curve and cross each other from the knuckles of her fingers right up to her elbow, clearly carving out the shapes of ancient symbols like the ones written on the den walls against her skin.

“There you go,” the man says after her next attempt at the knot, holding out his piece of rope so that she may compare the two. “The perfect knot. I told you you’d do it.”

“What’s the _point_ of learning this stupid knot?” she grouches and drops hers, boring now that she’s completed the task, the pleasure of accomplishment turning sour all-too-quickly on her tongue.

“So that you may set traps in the forest,” he tells her and rises slowly to his feet. “It’s a lot easier to catch a rabbit with a trap than with your bare hands.”

“I don’t _need_ to catch a rabbit,” she points out, even as she follows him into the trees. He steps carefully, brushing through the flowers on a path she has already wrought destruction along. She stomps, angry and uncaring about what he might think or say, about his patient lessons in the past about stepping softly and stalking carefully.

“You don’t need to catch a rabbit _now_ ,” he corrects her. “But you might in the future, and then you’ll be glad you learnt to make a trap.”

“I’ll never have to catch a rabbit,” she snaps. “I’m not even allowed to leave the den.”

“Well that’s not true.” He crouches at the base of a tree and sets out the trap slowly, so that she may watch him as he does it. “We’re outside the den right now.”

“I’m allowed to leave _with you_. That’s different.”

He sets his trap, and then sits back on his heels to admire it for a moment before carefully dismantling it. “You never know what will happen in the future, Willa,” he says sensibly. “You should try to be prepared for anything.” He gestures to the trap. “Here, you try now.”

She has more to say, but she bites her tongue and swallows the words instead, letting them boil in her stomach as she copies his trap. _You don’t know what will happen in the future_ , she snaps acerbically in her head; _because I’m supposed to be the Alpha and the pack will never let me be anything at all._

She can’t say such things out loud. The man doesn’t approve, always scolds her for saying such things and then drags her out into the main den like spending an hour with the other members of the pack will change anything. He thinks she doesn’t see the way they look at her, or hear the hushed whispers they pass between each other when she gets too close or lingers too long. He thinks she doesn’t notice when she is sent to her room and the other pups aren’t, that they never are.

He thinks she doesn’t know they’ll never accept her, that she’ll have to live under their thumb or out in the cold forever.

“Good,” he says when she’s done and pats her on the shoulder. “Just like a real hunter, see?” She feels no satisfaction at the achievement, only exhaustion, at the sunshine, at the bright flowers, at the lines that crease his kind face.

“Can we go home now?” she asks, and her voice is short and the words snap from her tongue and she doesn’t miss the dimming of his smile as he kicks apart the trap so that no animal will get caught if they don’t come back.

“Come on then,” he says, and offers her his hand – but she is not five anymore, and so she does not take it, just follows silently in his footsteps all the way home.

\---

It’s unusual for more than a few of the pack to still be awake when late morning starts to wear on, but today there are twenty or more of them gathered in the main part of the den.

Willa’s skin crawls under the weight of their eyes as she passes. The man is oblivious; he even greets a few of them, with a lift of his hand or a nod of his head. She greets none of them, and none of them greet her. Her eyes range across the crowd, looking for the boy, for the one face she finds vaguely familiar, but he is not here.

He is not often here; she doesn’t know where he goes or what he does, when the rest of the pack regularly come and go, and she never asks the man about him, even though she knows he would know the answer. She just quietly searches for him as she passes, just in case she might get a glimpse of him.

She hates her fascination with him, her curiousity about his life and his comings and goings, when he so obviously doesn’t know or care about her. It’s only because he’s her brother, because she vaguely remembers being his friend once, long ago; but it’s been so long, and he’s been so distant, that she wishes she would just forget about him, so that she could just ignore the other wolves and not lie awake at night trying to remember the things that happened when they were children.

She can’t remember what it was that drove him away, ten or more years ago; just that it was something she did, something she hadn’t realised had offended or scared him at the time. She only remembers him happy, small and round-faced, stumbling along behind her, and later, sitting on the ground sobbing as she stands over him, her arms crossed.

She can’t remember what she was angry about, or what made him cry. She’s pretty sure that was one of the last times she got that close to him though.

The man walks her back to her room – a sizeable cavern, dark except for her lantern and devoid of windows, buried deep under the mountain. Her bed lies unmade, blankets strewn to every side, and her desk is piled high with books ( _study_ , the man always urges her, _learn about the world, learn how to lead, learn everything you can_ ). In one corner, water from the river underground trickles continuously into a small basin, the remnants of her evening meal still sitting on the table next to it.

“You don’t want anything else?” the man asks as she sits down on her bed, toeing off her boots. He hovers in the doorway, halfway gone but still hesitant to disappear completely, still holding on to her.

“Why are all the others awake?” she says in lieu of an answer to his question, and watches as his brow furrows, as he battles with himself over whether or not he will tell her the answer.

“They are waiting,” he replies eventually, deliberately vague. “There is a meeting in the evening and they can’t sleep.”

She hates when he does this, when he tries to hide things from her, when he tries to lie and leave out details and misinform her like she is still a child, like she isn’t cunning and sharp and often left with far too much time to think. “What’s the meeting for?” she asks, poking, prying, grabbing at the secrets that hide under his tongue.

“Nothing for you to worry about,” he assures her, like _worry_ is the only reason she would ever ask.

She glares at him, her hands braced against the frame of her bed, the stone of the floor cold through her threadbare socks. “Tell me,” she implores him, in a voice that can’t be resisted. “I just want to know.”

“You don’t need to know,” he tells her again, and now there is an edge to his voice – not _anger_ , he is never angry, but an anticipation, a holding of breath, like he is waiting for her to explode.

“ _Tell_ me,” she insists.

“No.”

“You never tell me anything!” she roars and her fist crashes against the bedframe in frustration. She could swear he flinches, but she isn’t looking; she’s focused on the thrum of pain in her knuckles, the feeling of needles pinching the marks on her skin, crawling up her arm, driving her mad. “Why does the whole pack get to know except me?”

“Willa-” he begins, but she stands up and his words fall short as her eyes flash yellow; bright, fierce, sick of being caged.

He takes a deep breath. She sees it as it rattles from his ribcage, as he tries to send his fear away with it. It doesn’t work.

“They’re going to choose a new Alpha,” he tells her finally, a reluctant truth. “Willem died in the night, two days ago, and so they will choose tonight.”

 _Alpha_. He won’t look at her, won’t come any further than the door even as she sits back down on her bed. His eyes are on her hand, on the black marks that snake their way up her arm like vines, like an infection in her veins. _Alpha_ , they spell. _Destined_. She knows it’s supposed to be her, tonight, that some wolf many years ago had chosen her for this fate. She knows that he knows it too, and she knows he wishes he’d never told her, because now the moment has come and the pack will try to deny her this birthright, and she will sit here in the dark and let them take it.

The anger settles, but it doesn’t leave, just turns and boils quietly inside her at the thought of his deception, at him siding with the others, at her only claim to a life beyond this room being stolen from her in less than a day’s time and all the years she has wasted trying to be patient while she waited for it.

“Is that all you wanted?” he asks and clears his throat, trying to go back to his usual composure, his unbreakable sense of peace.

“Go away,” she snaps and lies back pointedly on her bed, fixing her eyes on the delicately carved ceiling. There’s a beat, and then she hears the door close and the shuffle of his footsteps as he walks away.

She lies there, and she thinks and she thinks, until finally she falls into a restless sleep.

\---

It starts a thousand years ago, in a moment long since lost to the moons as they pass and the stars as they die, when a woman looks up at a dark and stormy sky and searches the in-between for all the things that were and one day will be.

It is a talent that will be lost to time, the telling of the future. The writing of prophecies. This, the woman already knows (this has been seen before, by other wolves with a sight more powerful than hers), but she looks anyway; the loss of the talent one day means that they must see far ahead now, even if looking far ahead makes the visions blurry and fractured and telling of half a story, or they risk leaving their descendants to face a future of unknowns, to face so many things that could destroy them in one fell swoop.

First, she sees the pack, the numbers that rise and fall, hundreds of faces that live and die in a blink of her eye. She sees great battles, sees blood spill and men die, sees wolves more beast than anything else. She sees fires, floods, and snows, hard winters and plentiful springs, and the watchful eyes of the Alphas, down and down the line.

And then, she closes her eyes, and she sees the girl, her hair as black as the night, her eyes fierce like the mountain lion she will kill one day further on to save her pup. Her hand is stained with ink that was never spilled, marked with line upon black line that weave powerful runes against her flesh. _Alpha_ , the moonstone whispers, the woman’s fingers trembling against the warm stone. _Chosen. Warrior._

_Destroyer._

“ _Destroyer_?” she whispers, and then she sees this girl, angry and youthful, standing surrounded by the bodies of her packmates, blood pooling at her feet.

The woman rips away from the moonstone, surfacing from her dream with a gasp of cold and wet air as thunder rumbles in the sky. She looks up and watches the lightning flash, listens to the rain begin to pour outside, and then she turns to the walls of the den and she starts to write.

She hides the prophecy in the darkest corner she can find, and she leaves it there for years to come, sheltered from the wind and the rain and the weathering of curious young fingers rubbing at the curve of the letters, the drawing of the markings. Generations come and generations go, the woman grows old and dies sleeping peacefully at the fireside, her gift dying with her, and her prophecy waits and waits in the darkness, patient. Inevitable.

Eventually, on a night of a crescent moon, bright and clear, two babies are born somewhere deep in the den, and the prophecy stirs to life.

Not everything is right. It’s the oldest of all the prophecies, the one eyed most warily over all the years as wolf after wolf waits for the promised Alpha to come, and the things written in it don’t all come true. They aren’t supposed to be twins, for one thing, and their mother isn’t supposed to die. One is not supposed to wail and scream while the other lies small and pale and silent as the mountain. And neither is supposed to be born with hands painted in deep, pure black – one with an _almost_ perfect copy of the pattern recorded in the prophecy, the other with a handful of fractured lines, gathered around his wrist.

They almost die on that night, when the Alpha hears the news. They are almost put out in the forest to be taken away by whatever predator would have them, but their father has too kind a heart and the boy is likely to die before he has lived a day, and so they live, and they keep on living, and the prophecy sits quietly in the dark and waits for them to grow.

\---

“I just wanted to play their game!” the girl says one night, five years old and already full of restless fury, her face screwed up in frustration at her peers, at the pups she thinks have done her wrong.

“Maybe you just play too rough,” her father says, placating as he steers her towards her room. “Let them calm down, and then come and play with them later.”

It’s not really that she’s rough (well, she _is_ rough, but she doesn’t mean to be), or that she _wants_ to hurt and scare the other pups. It’s just that she’s so much _stronger_ than them, and that she doesn’t know how to control herself or the power that she drains from her moonstone, twice as fast as any other wolf in the pack. Even he is a little afraid of her sometimes, as small as she is now, because he can imagine her, grown and furious and caught up in the rush of the moonstone power that coils in her stomach and strikes like a snake. But it’s not her fault – it’s the fault of the pack, or him, for letting her grow so much without ever letting her grow with the power instead of against it.

He leaves her in her room to cool off, to kick at the walls and scream into a pillow and pace like some half-crazed animal trapped in a cage, and he goes back to the main den and to her brother, still crying in the arms of another wolf.

The woman who holds him is one of the oldest wolves in the pack, her hair streaked with silver and her skin lined and folded, her fingers fumbling as she wraps a strip of cloth around and around the pup’s arm, trying to staunch the bleeding. She smiles gently at the child, gives him a kiss on the head and a mouthful of sweet words in comfort, but as her eyes turn upwards to his father, they are dark and full of something bitter.

The Alpha catches him before he can go to the boy – Willem, only a few years older than him but with the disposition of a wolf far more frail. His grip on Rohan’s arm is relaxed, but his shoulders are tense and his eyes are angry to hide a much more deeply-rooted fear, something dreadful twisting at the corner of his mouth.

Rohan is not a man often bothered – life has dealt him many a difficult hand, and has also gifted him with the aplomb to keep trudging on despite it. He used to be good friends with this Alpha, used to offer advice and be listened to in return even though he was never Beta. They had grown up as orphans together, from the day Rohan came from the river to the day Willem won his title as Alpha, and life had been sweet, for a time…but Rohan’s children, his weak son and his cursed, headstrong daughter, had driven them apart, and the chasm only yawned wider as each year passed.

Willem had allowed the children to live, but he had done little else for them since then. He was a hard man, as Alpha, a man who ran his pack with an iron fist and a box of his own private fears that just grew bigger and bigger as the responsibility grew heavier on his shoulders. These days, long past the echoes of their friendship, Rohan feels only dread when the Alpha stops to talk to him, and today is no different – because it is always about Willa, always about the curse Willem reads in the lines on her arm.

“You know what I’m going to say, Rohan,” he speaks, and the river wolf sighs.

“It was an accident, Willem,” he replies, pleading.

“Your son is cut deep enough to scar, and _that’s_ all you say?” Willem snaps. “I told you this would happen. You should probably be glad it was her brother that was standing to close and not any of the others.”

Rohan’s eyes turn towards the boy again, pale and shaking in the corner. “She can’t help it,” he insists. “It’s the moonstone, and that mark, not her. It’s not her fault.”

Willem laughs, short and harsh and devoid of any humour. “How many times have you used that excuse?” he asks. “How many more will you try it?”

“If we just taught her how to control-”

“So that she can destroy us?” Willem shakes his head. “I shouldn’t have even let her live in this den, or anywhere near the pups. Every time something happens, the injuries get worse – it’s only a matter of time before one of them is killed, accidentally or not, and if she decides she enjoys watching the blood run…”

The Alpha’s eyes turn towards the prophecy, a line of runes in a room filled with tales of prosperity and disaster. Rohan wonders how many times he has read those words in the last five years, how many hours he has lain awake at night in fear of a small child and what she might become.

It’s no secret what Willem thinks of the twins. Rohan remembers, clearly, the Alpha’s attempts to rip them from his arms the night they were born, cold and astute and so caught up in his belief in one old prophecy written by a madwoman that he couldn’t hear the girl crying, couldn’t see the pink of their faces or feel the beating of their hearts.

He hasn’t tried to kill Wyatt again (though he has waited and waited for the boy to die, through a myriad of illnesses), but he has advocated quietly for Willa to be banished or burnt, has tried to turn the pack against Rohan, to nudge them out. The rumours are the worst, more so than even the discussions at pack meetings, where Willa is brought up again and again. The rumours spread to the pups, and the pups tell Wyatt and tease Willa – and she is young, but she is smart enough to know where the cruel words come from and what they mean.

Rohan hears them too, no matter how the other wolves try to hide them from here. _The curse_ , they whisper behind his back as he cares for his daughter, as he tries to shield her from the things that make her brittle and bitter, that build up like scar tissue around a heart that is only soft and sweet somewhere deep down. _The destroyer, the monster, the slaughter waiting to happen_.

 _We should have put her out in the night_ , a mother mumbles over a sleeping pup. _Willem is right. The prophecies don’t lie._

 _She will kill us all_.

Rohan shakes himself.

“This is unfair,” he says, the most defiant anyone would ever dare to be against the Alpha. “If she didn’t have that mark, you would prize her for her power. She’d be the first one to learn how to fight and how to lead.”

“It’s not _unfair_ ,” the Alpha snarls. “Her strength comes from a prophecy, and the prophecy says if she realises that power, the pack dies. I’m just keeping my people safe.”

“The _prophecy_ ,” Rohan scoffs. “We don’t even know if she _is_ the wolf from the prophecy; the marks don’t match, remember?”

“The marks are close enough,” Willem snaps. “Even if she isn’t, she’s out of control. She can’t be trusted to play with the little ones, she doesn’t understand or respect authority, and the older she gets the more dangerous she is.” He twists to point at Wyatt, wiping away his tears on the other side of the den. “She hurt her own brother today. It can’t go on, Rohan. I won’t allow it.”

Rohan stares at him. “What…what are you going to do, then?”

“It depends on what _you_ will do.” Willem’s eyes are a stormy grey, a cloudy sky on a day of rain and thunder, heavy and severe and devoid of any light. “I should send her away. You can take her away, if you want to, and go and find another pack to take you. I will let you go, and I won’t follow. I’ll promise you that.”

Rohan’s stomach turns at the thought of having to leave, at having to take his broken family of many packs and find yet another one to shelter them from the world. “I can’t leave,” he says. “Even if I wanted to, Wyatt is too weak to travel very far…and there’s no other packs that will take us. You know that. You know that I know that.”

Willem’s face turns grim, and Rohan knows he remembers the story – remembers when the river pack was hunted to nothing, when the wolves far to the south were scattered, dead, across the forest floor. Rohan had only told the story twice, to his wife and to Willem, and he had tried to forget it since. It is not a nice story; it is a story of a boy from the river, running and running and running again, away from everything he knew. It’s a story of many packs, too wary to let a stray wolf into their dens, and a story of a boy found half-dead in the woods far from any home he’d ever known, his moonstone dying, his strength broken.

Only one wolf of hundreds had been kind enough to pick him up and carry him home and give him life again, and that wolf was long dead. He would not place his trust in the kindness of any of the others again.

“The boy may stay,” the Alpha offers. “We would take care of him.”

Rohan shakes his head. “I won’t leave one of them behind,” he says out loud. _Liar_ , he says to himself, and wonders how long it would be until Wyatt was left out in the cold too without him.

“ _Something_ has to be done,” Willem insists. “I don’t want to force you to leave, but if she can’t be controlled-”

“What if I stayed with her? What if she is always watched when she is near others, and I find a way to…to control her?” Rohan’s voice is desperate enough that he thinks he sees a flicker of sympathy in the other wolf’s eyes. “Please, Willem, just give her a chance. She can be something other than a curse, I _promise_ – and if she has to leave later anyway, at least she might be old enough to understand _why_.”

The Alpha is silent for a long time.

“Okay,” he concedes eventually, and Rohan slumps in relief. “If she causes no trouble, and you stay with her, I will not banish her. But she is not to go near the other pups again; and you have to keep up with your duties to the pack like you always have. And if anything happens, I won’t give you a choice again.”

His eyes turn to Wyatt, sniffling where he is perched on a rock even as one of the mothers places a plate of bread and jam in his lap. “If you care about the boy, I would keep him away from her too,” he advises quietly. “She is too savage for even the strongest of the pups to keep up with – she will chew that boy up and spit him out the moment she gets bored of him.”

“I think you’re wrong, Willem,” Rohan says, his head bowed in respect. “But thank you. There won’t be any more trouble.”

(He is wrong on both parts, and there is plenty of trouble as the years wear on – but they survive. They always survive.)

\---

Sometime while she sleeps, the door is locked.

She stands and stares at it for a minute or two, beats her fist against it and hopes for an answer that doesn’t come. She listens, but there is no one passing by outside, no one in rooms nearby or calling down the hall. There is a very faint murmur of voices from somewhere far away; it must be night, then, she decides, and they must be at their meeting, ignorant to her, locked in a room far enough away that they won’t hear her even if she screams.

She can’t quite figure it out. It’s not _unusual_ for the door to be locked; her father locks it every time he leaves the den without her, or on the occasion when there is someone in the den baying for her blood, believing she has orchestrated some perceived slight against them. Sometimes it is _her_ that is angry, so much so that her hand burns and the colour leeches from her vision and her claws twitch, like she might bury them in someone’s neck.

It has never been locked without her knowing though. Only her father has the key, and he always, _always_ comes to see her before he goes – even when she is sleeping, he will wake her up, will make sure she knows he will be gone. This is different. Someone has come in the night and locked her in to keep her from that meeting, hoping she wouldn’t notice or perhaps thinking she wouldn’t be able to find a way out. Someone is scared of what might happen if she does.

She doesn’t need to know who it was; it could have been any of them – the pups, the hunters, the elders…even the boy, always afraid of her, always shying for no reason when he sees her. The only one she’s sure wouldn’t have done it is the man, as much as she might want to blame it on him. But it doesn’t matter – the only thing that matters is that she is in here, and they are out there, and her fate is in the hands of wolves that have made sure she can’t do anything about it.

Anger stirs in her gut, stewing and growing, threatening to bubble over. Is this the breaking point? Is this, fifteen years old, the day of the year when she can’t take it anymore? When she fulfils the second part of the prophecy, the part they are most scared of?

The more she thinks about it, the more sure she is – she’s hungry, and thirsty, and trapped like a pet dog, and they have left her here so that they may give away her birthright to some other unworthy wolf, someone as frightened and as cowardly as the rest of them. All her life, this pack have waited for this moment, have shoved her away and denied her everything and told her she’s a monster for something she might have never dreamt of doing if they had not.

And would it be so bad if she killed them all? She thinks now that maybe it wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even miss them, like she won’t miss their dead Alpha and the sideways, calculating looks he would always give her, the metaphorical clock he always held over her head. _Don’t mess up, or you will have to leave_ , the man would whisper to her, and she would stand up straighter and paste on a smile and barely dare to move her hands…and still the clock would tick and still they all wanted her gone.

If she listens closely, she can hear them in the den above her, their voices rising and falling. _Choosing a new Alpha_ , the man had said when he’d left her. There is no doubt. There is no end to her fury.

She hammers at the door, her fist pounding against the old, heavy oak it’s carved from. “Hey!” she shouts, loud enough that she knows it will echo down the hall and knocks again. “Let me out!”

There is no answer. Of course there isn’t – they are busy making it clear she is not part of their pack, and they have locked the door specifically to stop her from doing anything about it. “Let me _out_!” she screams, until her throat is raw, until her hands ache from beating and scratching at the door, from trying to pry the cast-iron lock from the wood.

She doesn’t even think about how the anger consumes her, how it is all-encompassing and blind to anything else. She doesn’t notice the gouges her claws have left in the wood, or the splinters scattered on the floor. She is desperate, filled with a sudden need to be _out_ , to be something more than she has ever been in her life…a burning urge, deep inside her, to become what she was always supposed to be, and to destroy anyone who still dares to stand in her way.

The fury burns at her until she can’t physically go on – until she falls to her knees in the darkness, gasping for breath, blood dripping from her fingers onto the cold stone of the floor. There’s a moment when she stops and wonders if she will have to give up. She wonders if she has waited and waited and let the man pacify her every impatience all these years just to have her spirit broken right here, to be thrown out in the forest in several hours by hands that were only ever stayed by the Alpha’s fondness for her father.

In the silence that follows, there is a _click_ as the lock turns, and then the door creaks open to admit a crack of flickering light.

Her breath catches in her throat, her thoughts screeching to a halt. Slowly, she gets to her feet and opens the door properly, stepping out into the hallway.

Four steps away, his face thrown into deep shadows and flickering reflections caught in wide eyes, stands the boy, a lantern clutched in one hand and a key in the other.

For a moment, they just stare at each other. He is poised to run at any sign of aggression from her, and she is…speechless, motionless, caught by surprise at his presence here, now. Her mind races, searching for an explanation, but there isn’t one. She’d thought he hated her. She’s thought he would never get this close to her again.

“You…” she begins, like she has something to say, and then finds there are no words to say at all.

“Hi,” he says in reply, and she watches as he forces a deep breath in and out of his chest.

“Hi.” She can’t remember the last time she’s spoken so quietly, or even been greeted and returned the favour. It feels so alien, so new and unlike herself, that for a moment she is frozen, unsure what else to do.

The boy is no better, his fingers trembling on the handle of the lantern he carries as he stares at her. “I’m Wyatt,” he says hesitantly. “I’m-”

“You’re my brother,” she finishes for him, and shakes herself; it is unlike her, to be so thrown off balance by one chance encounter, one random wolf deigning to speak more than five words to her. She doesn’t like it. She prefers how she usually is; impatient and heady and not scared by anything the others think they can throw at her.

“What are you doing here?” she asks, and _now_ she sounds more like herself.

He holds up the key in his other hand. “I saw them lock the door,” he explains. “I heard what they were saying. And…I felt…” He looks like he has something else to say, but he hesitates and then drops the conversation, the same way he drops the key into his pocket.

“You’re supposed to be the next Alpha,” he says instead, his attention directed back towards her. “The elders all had a dream, a prophecy, that said you’re the Alpha.”

“I know,” she replies haughtily, though she didn’t know about the dream. “They don’t want me to be the Alpha. That’s why they locked the door; because they think I want to challenge them for it.”

The boy frowns. “No,” he says, and then trembles under the shift of her gaze from confident to piercing. “That’s not why they locked the door.”

She glares at him, her arms crossed. “How would you know?”

“I-I told you, I heard what they were saying-” He glances down the hall behind him uncertainly, like there might be someone listening to them in turn. “They…they said they’re going to get rid of our father. And then they tried to throw away the key so that the door would never be unlocked.”

She stares at him. “You’re lying,” she accuses him, because the truth is harder to believe. “If they threw the key away, how do you have it?”

“I followed them,” he says, shuffling his feet like she might tell him off for this too. “Down to the river. And then I swam down and got it back.”

“You _swam_ ,” she repeats, like she might scoff at him. “Aren’t you the one that’s always sick?”

He pulls a face. “Not _anymore_. I-” He’s about to say something more, but he’s cut off by a clamour of voices from somewhere above them, loud enough to reach all the way into the den. Their eyes both turn towards the source of the noise, watching, listening.

“They’re going to make Werner Alpha soon,” the boy says eventually, quiet against the noise of the pack. “It will be over soon.”

“I have to go,” she tells him abruptly, and then she turns on her heel and storms away up the hall, up towards the main part of the den and the wolves that are gathered there.

“What are you doing?” he asks in alarm, and she thinks she hears him following her. It’s hard to tell between his footsteps and the pounding in her ears of her heart beating faster and faster.

“Willa!” he cries, trying to stop her.

It’s the first time he’s said her name since they were children. She almost comes to a halt, almost turns back to see what he so desperately wants – but fresh pain prickles in her hand, in the marks on her arm, and voices rise again somewhere ahead of her, and she leaves him behind, stomping up and up and up.

She finds the pack where she had expected them to be, half seated on the ground and half on their feet, shouting at one another. A woman she knows is named Wynne stands at their head, high on the parapet, watching them squabble with her arms crossed and her lips drawn together unhappily. The man (her _father_ ) stands at the forefront of the crowd, his eyes turned towards the woman, unaware that Willa lingers in the shadows.

Halfway up the stairs, a boy stands tall and strong and with an angry gleam to his eyes that Willa doesn’t like. This must be Werner, she guesses, her competition. Her _replacement_. His gaze roams across the pack – and then lands on her, at the very edge of the cavern.

His face drops.

He rushes up the stairs to tap on Wynne’s arm and to whisper in her ear.

“ _Quiet_!” the woman shouts over the noise of the crowd and slowly, the voices die and the echoes fade. Her eyes flicker uncertainly between Willa and the crowd. Willa wonders if the woman can taste the fear that shivers down her spine at the sight of her own personal curse, come to visit.

“What do you want, child?” Wynne calls across the den, pointing; and slowly, all eyes turn to Willa.

The younger wolf wants to shy under this much attention, wants to cringe away from the eyes before she can do something she’ll regret – but the mark burns and the boiling rage churns in her stomach, and their faces remind her of the locked door, of every time they have put a wall between her and who she is supposed to be-

“I want what is mine,” she replies, loud and clear as the morning sky. Her feet propel her forwards, out of the darkness and into the moonlight that falls over the crowd. They part as she steps into their midst like a log splitting in half, two sides of the wood flinching away from the axe as it falls.

“And what do you imagine you own?” The disdain is clear in Wynne’s voice, her belief that she owes Willa nothing. The Alpha’s moonstone is clutched in her hand, dangling prettily from the string that is tangled between her fingers.

Willa’s blood boils.

“That moonstone is mine,” she says and points with one ink-stained finger. Curling her hand eases the pain, turns it to a tingling numbness for a few blessed seconds. “This _pack_ is mine. I’m here to take them.”

Wynne stares at her in disbelief. Then, she _laughs_.

“You want to be the Alpha?” she summarises, like Willa is crazy. “ _You_?”

“I _am_ the Alpha,” Willa snaps in reply. “I was always going to be.”

“ _I’m_ the Alpha!” Werner snarls, brave where he stands far above her, the moonstone within his reach. “You were _never_ going to be Alpha. You should have died the day you were born!”

Willa’s face darkens. It is one thing for the elders to say such things – the older wolves, the ones stuck in their prejudice and weathered by their age – but it is another thing for this boy, not much older than her and twice as conceited, to say it. She’s never done anything to this boy (she’s never done anything to any of them, but him especially, she has barely ever even _looked_ at, she knows for sure), and yet he sees fit to stand there and judge her, like he has any power over her.

He has no power over her.

None of them will have any power over her again.

She looks at them all, at the crowd around her, unsettled and muttering, at her brother at the very back, at her father to her left, by the stairs; frowning, like she’s doing something wrong, but not moving against her. She looks back up at Werner and Wynne, glaring daggers from their place above everyone’s heads, like holding the high ground means something to them.

She climbs the stairs, faster, angrier, than she has ever done anything before.

There’s a scuffling from above her that she can’t see as she climbs, a rise of surprised noise below her as the pack shifts backwards, well away from the lookout and the stairs and whatever is about to happen. She barely reaches the top of the stairs before she is met by Werner blocking her way, teeth bared and eyes flashing, the Alpha’s moonstone bright around his neck.

Her eyes narrow, focused not on his face or the threats that slither from his tongue, but on the moonstone. _Her_ moonstone. _Her_ rightful place. Her hand prickles and burns, more painful than it has ever been, reaching through her shoulder and up to her neck, clenching her windpipe so tight she can’t breathe. Her fist flexes, curling and uncurling, the moonstone she wears now drains of power quicker than it ever has before, swirling blue and yellow at her neck, but there is no relief. There is no end to the fury that fills her up, that blurs her vision, that roars so loud in her ears she can’t hear Werner speaking, or Wynne behind her, or Wyatt at the bottom of the stairs.

She blinks, and her hand is wrapped around Werner’s neck, so tight that the words get caught in his throat, unable to work their way up to his useless, waggling tongue. She blinks again and her claws are in his jugular, tearing it apart and throwing him to the floor.

Blood pours over the markings on her hand and her wrist; for a second, she could swear they turn blue, a prophecy complete, a position claimed. It cools the fire in her arm, the pain that streaks up and down her arm. When she pulls the moonstone from Werner’s neck, when she puts it on and tosses her dead and useless one to the floor, the fire goes away completely; finally, _finally_ , she has what it has always wanted. What she always needed.

The anger doesn’t fade. She turns to Wynne, her eyes dark, her hands bloody, and she growls, loud enough to fill up the whole den. The pack whimpers. The woman raises her hands, shaking, and cringes, submitting, afraid.

“ _I’m_ the Alpha,” Willa snaps, to Wynne and to the pack, in case there is still any doubt. “This is _my_ den. And for fifteen years of abuse, of _torture_ , I will _kill_ you _all_.”

“Willa, stop!”

The voice comes from behind her, achingly familiar even after just one conversation with him. She half-turns to face Wyatt, to take in his pleading, desperate face, his hand stretched out towards her. “You’re the Alpha,” he says, and his hand shakes, hovering in the space between them “Don’t be what they want you to be. Don’t be – don’t be that monster.”

“There’s a prophecy, Wyatt,” Willa snarls. “Maybe it _should_ be fulfilled. Maybe they deserved it all this time.”

“You don’t have to be a prophecy,” he begs. “Or a curse, or anything they call you.”

“Anything _they_ called me?” She stares at him, like she can’t believe what he’s saying, like she’s going to call him a liar again. “You say those things too. You’re _one_ of them. I haven’t seen you in _years_.”

“I _never_ said those things,” he insists. “I-I was _afraid_. You scared me, once, and I could feel your anger, and I stayed-” He struggles to find the words, so he turns instead, lifting his right sleeve to show her his arm, to show her the long, puckered scars of claws raking down his arm, never truly healed.

She doesn’t remember – or maybe she does, maybe she just chose to forget. Maybe she knows it was her that left them there, that he’d been teasing her, like children do, and she’d felt that anger inside her, and she’d let it lash out at him, like it had lashed out at Werner just a minute ago. Maybe she knows that he’d cried – that he’d _screamed_ – that his blood had been on her hands as he’d fled.

She remembers, vividly, in that moment, that her father had once said to her, _you are stronger, so that you can take care of Wyatt_. And then she remembers that the only thing she’d ever needed to protect him from was her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and stumbles a step away from Wynne, a step towards Wyatt, before she can do anything she regrets.

“I know,” he says, and drops his sleeve. “And I know how to fix it.” He reaches out his hand again – his right hand, his wrist painted in scattered lines, just like hers is black with intricate shapes.

She reaches out, the markings the deepest blue, her fingers red with blood, and his fingers wrap around wrist, gentler than anything she’s ever known. His touch is like ice; she shudders at the sensation and almost pulls away, her skin burning in an entirely different way, and then his hand slips down to fit in her fingers, and she looks down and realises that part of the marking has gone with it, the prophecy wiped away by his touch.

“How-” she begins to ask, but she can’t even begin to form the words, can’t find the breath to speak them.

“Yours was never a perfect copy of the marking from the prophecy,” he mumbles, quiet enough that the wolves watching won’t be able to hear him. “And mine is just…lines.” Their eyes turn down to his wrist at the same time, to the disjointed marks that skid across his skin like the marks left by an errant pen. “If you put them together…”

She stares at their hands, at the prophecy, split between twins that were never meant to be twins at all, and then at his face – at his eyes. The fear is gone from them now, replaced only by acceptance, by relief, by all the things she has been missing for so many years.

Drawing in a breath, she pulls her hand from his grip and wraps her arms around him, ignorant of the blood on her hands, of the dead boy behind him, of the muttering of the crowd below them. It’s the first time she’s hugged him in ten years; it’s the first time she’s hugged _anyone_ in ten years.

As his arms wrap around her body in response, squeezing her tight, it feels like coming home, in a way nothing ever has before.

**Author's Note:**

> thankyou for reading! p l e a s e remember to leave a comment, I live for the emails. for more of my zombies stuff or to send prompts (or just to say hi!), have a gander at my tumblr [zombiedadjokes](zombiedadjokes.tumblr.com)!


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